


The Hour

by gudhvinr



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Delirium, Gen, Original Cole, POV First Person, Prose Poem, Spiritual, Starvation, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-08 23:58:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3228389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gudhvinr/pseuds/gudhvinr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last moments of a boy named Cole. One-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lysistratus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysistratus/gifts).



> This piece was partially inspired by [this piece of fanart](http://imgur.com/jUwGCVI). If anyone knows the name of the artist, I'd be happy to attribute it to them here.

Night without stars, without end, the darkness reeking so mightily my nose feels as if burned. Blacker than sin all around me, framed in stone once slick now turned to crust with the drying of the filth that flowed forth from my body.

Always falling. The shadows lurch about me, as if my body soars. Fingers flex, to seize my throat again. Four talons clutch, crush, and my head is thrown back to escape the grip, crashing against the stones. False light bursts across my vision. I can feel the throb of blood from the ends of my fingers. Sweetest iron, so not fruitless, though I am still alive.

Always falling twisting jerking on the strings that bind my limbs to ... the Maker? To His bride? I have cried out for the fate of the caged beast and heard no reply but the cackles of my own grief. Perhaps this is my damnation, my severing from His presence to tumble through space while words slip beyond the rim of memory. The restless dead have become my race and tribe, the groans of vomit a tongue I think I know.

"I know a song from before the world was born, and it goes:"

Shivers wrack the void. I curl in, and thoughts go still. Cold circles around me, blows its breath down my spine and through my string-thick gut. _This is the hour_ , I pray.

It is not the hour. In between breaths there is a long and restful stillness, though I try to make it yet longer to use that as my shelter but my lungs rebel and billow with the chill and fetid air.

If only I could bring myself to bite out my tongue. Perhaps it would even work.

On an autumn morning Bunny and I ran through empty fields where rye had grown and rotten apples burst upon the frosted earth as we flung them round like sling-stones the oaks shuddered and whispered in the breeze as a great blue storm-head enveloped the falling sun but I carried her home upon my shoulders and we said the rhyme to count the stars upon Andraste's crown in Maker's name so let it be mother cow mother cow give us milk we pleaded to her udder and laughed and danced before the night that I broke Bunny's neck and listened to the twitter of her breath a songbird vanishing into distance I thought that I would help us hide and then

Always pushed away. Falling still. Memory is no shelter but there is nothing I can do to stop the clawing the pleading the tearing-forth of shrieks. At least it will end it will end it will end dear _Maker_.

'The sun, does it not send its kindly rays over all things? Does not its brilliance illumine the shores of the sea as it does the crest of the mountain? So it is with the merciful gaze of the Maker.' Chanter Eli. He is dead, his poxy corpse thrown upon the pyre.

There were nights and there were nights when the end loomed about me like a great gate yawning. Now it seems just beyond my fingers' reach. It flutters on the breath of anguish, every bare moment bringing it closer than before.

"Cole."

It cannot hurt to try, to press tooth against tongue, to squeeze...

"Cole."

What knows my name?

I wait a moment, but nothing. The visions and the hearing have come to me before in this place, men without skins heaving dark chains behind them as they sail across my sight. Shards of song, sundered, have skittered along my ears. I sag back against the stone.

Perhaps I sleep, for there are dreams, forgotten as soon as they appear. Like me.

"Let me be near to you. There is no one else to help you now, but I will."

Outside of the domain of day, there was a boy who drank his own blood and could count himself lucky, for at least that still seemed to have a taste. Here he belonged, to pay the sin-price for a dead sister.

"No. You were trying to save her, to protect her, not to have it end the way that it did. You only made a mistake. It isn't your fault."

Spasms split the void. Stomach squeezing to rid itself of a few more drops of bloody bile that fall upon the floor beneath me. Once, that would have brought sweating to my brow and back, but nothing now.

 _Let me_ out _!_ let me out let me out let me outoutOUT ragged claws dragged across bare brick face pressed against it lips of ruined leather smashed to walls breath blown back in my face a dog's howl through the black shredding throat bursting scabs upon my cheeks to ooze once more all things fallen into this

I dream again.

A glow.

My eyes burn, shut fast. There would have been tears, once. I feel the brush of heat upon my face, like sunlight.

"Please, do not turn away now. You don't have to face it all alone." A whisper of substance upon one cheek, like the fluff of dandelions. I see a rose gleam even with eyes closed. Like flame through my skull, setting the last sparks of thought to scatter.

Perhaps it is fitting for the end of my days to be darkness at last seized in the jaws of light.

"It's all right to hold on to everything that's gone wrong." The voice, become a man's. My own. Quavering? "I can help. Can fix it..." The touch against my cheek turned flesh-firm, the arc of neck to collar to breastbone, and it heaves with the tide of breath. "Can you open your eyes? It is so distant from where I belong." I open them.

The radiance faded to a pale corona, limning fingers that caress up my jaw and cheek, to rest upon a temple where still there burns an ember of the Maker's sacred fire. I grant permissions unspoken.

"Yes. I see now." Another hand, warm like summer wine, beneath my arm and stroking the rafters of my ribs. "It will be enough."

I pull my face back to gaze upon my face. I tear a word forth from the rawhide of my throat, the only word that matters now. "Remember."

Confusion steals across that visage, but then reverts to otherworldly calm. "Yes."

My brow falls upon a bare breast, my body collapsing at last into an impossible embrace.

Nothing on this side ties me.

I leave myself behind, and take flight from the black.

**Author's Note:**

> This was hard to write. Part of me wishes it could be longer, but I'm not sure how much of that I could really bear. I feel that this much, at least, was needed.


End file.
